By Robert D. Kaplan
For over two years, the civil war in Syria has been synonymous with cries of moral urgency. Do Something! shout
those who demand the United States intervene militarily to set the
situation there to rights, even as the battle lines now comprise
hundreds of regime and rebel groupings and the rebels have started
fighting each other. Well, then, shout the moral interventionists, if only we had intervened earlier!
Syria is not unique. Before Syria, humanitarians in 2011 demanded military intervention in Libya,
even though the regime of Muammar Qaddafi had given up its nuclear
program and had been cooperating for years with Western intelligence
agencies. In fact, the United States and France did lead an
intervention, and Libya today is barely a state, with Tripoli less a
capital than the weak point of imperial-like arbitration for far-flung
militias, tribes, and clans, while nearby Saharan entities are in
greater disarray because of weapons flooding out of Libya.
The 1990s were full of calls for humanitarian intervention: in
Rwanda, which tragically went unheeded; and in Bosnia and Kosovo where
interventions, while belated, were by and large successful. Free from
the realpolitik necessities of the Cold War, humanitarians have in the
past two decades tried to reduce foreign policy to an aspect of genocide
prevention. Indeed, the Nazi Holocaust is only one lifetime removed
from our own—a nanosecond in human history—and so post–Cold War foreign
policy now rightly exists in the shadow of it. The codified upshot has
been R2P: the “Responsibility to Protect,” the mantra of humanitarians.
But American foreign policy cannot merely be defined by R2P and Never Again!
Statesmen can only rarely be concerned with humanitarian interventions
and protecting human rights to the exclusion of other considerations.
The United States, like any nation—but especially because it is a great
power—simply has interests that do not always cohere with its values.
That is tragic, but it is a tragedy that has to be embraced and
accepted.
What are those overriding interests? The United States, as the
dominant power in the Western Hemisphere, must always prevent any other
power from becoming equally dominant in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Moreover, as a liberal maritime power, the United States must seek to
protect the sea lines of communication that enable world trade. It must
also seek to protect both treaty and de facto allies, and especially
their access to hydrocarbons. These are all interests that, while not
necessarily contradictory to human rights, simply do not operate in the
same category.
Because the United States is a liberal power, its interests—even when
they are not directly concerned with human rights—are generally moral.
But they are only secondarily moral. For seeking to adjust the balance
of power in one’s favor has been throughout history an amoral enterprise
pursued by both liberal and illiberal powers. Nevertheless, when a
liberal power like the United States pursues such a goal in the service
of preventing war among major states, it is acting morally in the
highest sense.
A telling example of this tension—one that gets to the heart of why Never Again! and
R2P cannot always be the operative words in statesmanship—was recently
provided by the foreign-affairs expert Leslie H. Gelb. Gelb noted
that after Saddam Hussein had gassed close to seven thousand Kurds to
death in northern Iraq in 1988, even a “truly ethical” secretary of
state, George Shultz, committed a “moral outrage.” For Shultz basically
ignored the incident and continued supporting Saddam in his war against
Iran, because weakening Iran—not protecting the citizens of Iraq—was the
primary American interest at the time.
So was Shultz acting immorally? Not completely, I believe. Shultz was
operating under a different morality than the one normally applied by
humanitarians. His was a public morality; not a private one. He and the
rest of the Reagan administration had a responsibility to the hundreds
of millions of Americans under their charge. And while these millions
were fellow countrymen, they were more crucially voters and citizens,
essentially strangers who did not know Shultz or Reagan personally, but
who had entrusted the two men with their interests. And the American
public’s interest clearly dictated that of the two states, Iran and
Iraq, Iran at the time constituted the greater threat. In protecting the
public interest of even a liberal power, a statesman cannot always be
nice; or humane.
I am talking here of a morality of public outcomes, rather than one
of private intentions. By supporting Iraq, the Reagan administration
succeeded in preventing Iran in the last years of the Cold War from
becoming a regional hegemon. That was an outcome convenient to U.S.
interests, even if the morality of the affair was ambiguous, given that
Iraq’s regime was at the time the more brutal of the two.
In seeking good outcomes, policymakers are usually guided by
constraints: a realistic awareness of what, for instance, the United
States should and should not do, given its finite resources. After all,
the United States had hundreds of thousands of troops tied down in
Europe and Northeast Asia during the Cold War, and thus had to contain
Iran through the use of a proxy, Saddam’s Iraq. That was not entirely
cynical: it was an intelligent use of limited assets in the context of a
worldwide geopolitical struggle.
The problem with a foreign policy driven foremost by Never Again!
is that it ignores limits and the availability of resources. World War
II had the secondary, moral effect of saving what was left of European
Jewry. Its primary goal and effect was to restore the European and Asian
balance of power in a manner tolerable to the United States—something
that the Nazis and the Japanese fascists had overturned. Of course, the
Soviet Union wrested control of Eastern Europe for nearly half a century
following the war. But again, limited resources necessitated an
American alliance with the mass-murderer Stalin against the
mass-murderer Hitler. It is because of such awful choices and attendant
compromises—in which morality intertwines with amorality—that
humanitarians will frequently be disappointed with the foreign policy of
even the most heroic administrations.
World War II certainly involved many hideous compromises and even
mistakes on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s part. He got into the war
in Europe very late, he did not bomb the rail tracks leading to the
concentration camps, he might have been more aggressive with the Soviets
on the question of Eastern Europe. But as someone representing the
interests of the millions of strangers who had and had not voted for
him, his aim was to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in a manner
that cost the fewest American soldiers’ lives, and utilized the least
amount of national resources. Saving the remnants of European Jewry was a
moral consequence of his actions, but his methods contained tactical
concessions that had fundamental amoral elements. Abraham Lincoln, for
his part, brought mass suffering upon southern civilians in the last
phase of the Civil War in order to decisively defeat the South. The
total war waged by generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S.
Grant was evidence of that. Simply put, there are actions of state that
are the right things to do, even if they cannot be defined in terms of
conventional morality.
Amoral goals, properly applied, do have moral effects. Indeed, in
more recent times, President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state,
Henry Kissinger, rushed arms to Israel following a surprise attack by
Arab armies in the fall of 1973. The two men essentially told the
American defense establishment that supporting Israel in its hour of
need was the right thing to do, because it was necessary to send an
unambiguous message of resolve to the Soviets and their Arab allies at a
critical stage in the Cold War. Had they justified the arms transfers
purely in terms of helping embattled post-Holocaust Jewry—rather than in
terms of power politics as they did—it would have made for a much
weaker argument in Washington, where officials rightly had American
interests at heart more than Israeli ones. George McGovern was possibly a
more ethical man than either Nixon or Kissinger. But had he been
elected president in 1972, would he have acted so wisely and so
decisively during the 1973 Middle East war? The fact is, individual
perfection, as Machiavelli knew, is not necessarily synonymous with
public virtue.
Then there is the case of Deng Xiaoping. Deng approved the brutal
suppression of students at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. For that
he is not respected among humanitarians in the West. But the
consolidation of Communist Party control that followed the clampdown
allowed for Deng’s methodical, market-oriented reforms to continue for a
generation in China. Perhaps never before in recorded economic history
have so many people seen such a dramatic rise in living standards, with
an attendant rise in personal (if not political) freedoms in so short a
time frame. Thus, Deng might be considered both a brutal Communist and
the greatest man of the twentieth century. The morality of his life is
complex.
The Bosnia and Kosovo interventions of 1995 and 1999 are frequently
held out as evidence that the United States is most effective when it
acts according to its humanitarian values—never mind its amoral
interests. But those who make that argument neglect to mention that the
two successful interventions were eased by the fact that America
operated in the Balkans with the balance-of-power strongly in its favor.
Russia in the 1990s was weak and chaotic under Boris Yeltsin’s
incompetent rule, and thus temporarily less able to challenge the United
States in a region where historically the czars and commissars had
exerted considerable sway. However, Russia, even in the 1990s, still
exerted considerable sway in the Caucasus, and thus a Western response
to halt ethnic cleansing there during the same decade was not even
considered. More broadly, the 1990s allowed for ground interventions in
the Balkans because the international climate was relatively benign:
China was only just beginning its naval expansion
(endangering our Pacific allies) and September 11 still lay in the
future. Truly, beyond many a moral response lies a question of power
that cannot be explained wholly in terms of morality.
Thus, to raise morality as a sole arbiter is ultimately not to be
serious about foreign policy. R2P must play as large a role as
realistically possible in the affairs of state. But it cannot ultimately
dominate. Syria is the current and best example of this. U.S. power is
capable of many things, yet putting a complex and war-torn Islamic
society’s house in order is not one of them. In this respect, our tragic
experience in Iraq is indeed relevant. Quick fixes like a no-fly zone
and arming the rebels may topple Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, but
that might only make President Barack Obama culpable in midwifing to
power a Sunni-Jihadist regime, even as ethnic cleansing of al-Assad’s
Alawites commences. At least at this late juncture, without significant
numbers of Western boots on the ground for a significant
period—something for which there is little public support—the likelihood
of a better, more stable regime emerging in Damascus is highly
questionable. Frankly, there are just no easy answers here, especially
as the pro-Western regime in Jordan is threatened by continued Syrian
violence. R2P applied in 2011 in Syria might actually have yielded a
better strategic result: it will remain an unknowable.
Because moralists in these matters are always driven by righteous
passion, whenever you disagree with them, you are by definition immoral
and deserve no quarter; whereas realists, precisely because they are
used to conflict, are less likely to overreact to it. Realists know that
passion and wise policy rarely flow together. (The late diplomat
Richard Holbrooke was a stunning exception to this rule.) Realists
adhere to the belief of the mid-twentieth-century University of Chicago
political scientist, Hans Morgenthau, who wrote that “one must work
with” the base forces of human nature, “not against them.” Thus,
realists accept the human material at hand in any given place, however
imperfect that material may be. To wit, you can’t go around toppling
regimes just because you don’t like them. Realism, adds Morgenthau,
“appeals to historical precedent rather than to abstract principles [of
justice] and aims at the realization of the lesser evil rather than of
the absolute good.”
No group of people internalized such tragic realizations better than
Republican presidents during the Cold War. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard
Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush all practiced amorality,
realism, restraint and humility in foreign affairs (if not all the
time). It is their sensibility that should guide us now. Eisenhower
represented a pragmatic compromise within the Republican Party between
isolationists and rabid anti-Communists. All of these men supported
repressive, undemocratic regimes in the third world in support of a
favorable balance of power against the Soviet Union. Nixon accepted the
altogether brutal regimes in the Soviet Union and “Red” China as
legitimate, even as he balanced one against the other. Reagan spoke the
Wilsonian language of moral rearmament, even as he awarded the key
levers of bureaucratic power to realists like Caspar Weinberger, George
Shultz and Frank Carlucci, whose effect regarding policy was to temper
Reagan’s rhetoric. The elder Bush did not break relations with China
after the Tiananmen uprising; nor did he immediately pledge support for
Lithuania, after that brave little country declared its independence—for
fear of antagonizing the Soviet military. It was caution and restraint
on Bush’s part that helped bring the Cold War to a largely peaceful—and,
therefore, moral—conclusion. In some of these policies, the difference
between amorality and morality was, to paraphrase Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim, no more than “the thickness of a sheet of paper.”
And that is precisely the point: foreign policy at its best is
subtle, innovative, contradictory, and truly bold only on occasion,
aware as its most disciplined practitioners are of the limits of
American power. That is heartrending, simply because calls to alleviate
suffering will in too many instances go unanswered. For the essence of
tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good, so much as the triumph of
one good over another that causes suffering.
Robert D. Kaplan is chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm. His latest book is The Revenge of Geography.
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